Challenges for Future Generations: space, brain preservation and more!

Continuing in a space and science vein, let's reprise the topic from last time... only this time with another of my rambunctious-uppity videos.

Are we ready, once again, to be a bold, dynamic people, ambitious and confident, ready to take on new challenges and new horizons? See Our Reborn Future in Space, my look at the ambitious proposal by Planetary Resources to mine asteroids for "trillions" in purported mineral wealth. How are these billionaires planning to obtain metals and fuel by mining nearby asteroids? Has the future finally arrived?

Is it B.S. or not B.S.? In Part 2: Science or Fiction? I discuss the obstacles, technical and economic, facing Planetary Resources.

And while we're on the subject... see a brief  but philosophical view of how crucial the next few human generations may be. Part of a series produced by the European Commission’s Horizons 2020 project. 

== Is your brain worth the bother? ==

The Brain Preservation Foundation is an interesting enterprise co-developed by John Smart (Acceleration Studies Foundation) that's offering a prize for researchers who manage to preserve animal brains in ways that would be suitable for humans and that keep intact the web of physical connections - or the connectome - that some believe to contain all of the information in both memory and thoughts. Brain preservation aims at locking in these connections against post-mortem decay.

Yes, you've heard of Alcor which will contract to rush in the moment you are declared dead and perfuse your brain (or whole body) with chemicals so it can be cooled in liquid nitrogen. The contracts are expensive ($200,000 for whole body cryonics) and the promised event would be very gaudy. Still, it seemed the only option, for those whose aim (some might say fetish) was to have their physical organic brain itself someday brought back to life.  

I appraise the tradeoffs in an article: Do we really want immortality?

Believers in the connectome don't expect or need the organic brain to be revived, so long as all the synapses and their weightings can be preserved and later nano-traced in perfect detail. They hope memories, even personality, might be emulated - some say "revived" - in a computer setting. 

 Now... I have some deep reservations about this "connectome" business, suspecting that there may be a lot more at work, possibly deep within the associated cells or in highly non-linear and ephemeral standing waves. Moreover, the semantic distinction between emulation and revival is one that we could argue about for decades... and will.

But let's run with this. Here's the innovative idea.  If the connectome is everything, then preserve that.  No need to revive the organo-colloidal brain, so plasticize it!  Lock it in lucite.  Store it at room temperature, on your kids' mantle or book shelf. No garish emergency room procedures or draining/perfusions around grieving relatives and no ongoing refrigeration fees. Heck, why not be decorative, till the nano-dissectors and hifalutin computers are ready...

Well, as I said, I have doubts at many levels.  Still, it has advantages over the gaudy, rather chilling image of cryo skull-dipping. To become a knick-knack. A conversational tchotchke on my descendants' shelf... and at much lower price, with a lot less drama or dependence on fickle contracts?  Well, it grows more... hm... the word isn't "tempting."  But let me put it to you.

What level would the price need to reach before you shrugged and said: sure, sign me up?

==More on the flexible Human Mind==

Using brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in math.   Teaching students to control their emotions prior to doing math may be the best way to overcome the math difficulties that often go along with math anxiety.   READ THIS.

Much discussed  at the "Transhumanism" talks at TedX DelMar where I spoke about space in our neo-human future... brain-computer interfaces, which are starting to mature.... or IMmature!  See for example Brainball!  a special table uses magnets to move a ball AWAY from you the more RELAXED you are. (You wear a brain wave monitor.) I love the image of the two competitors, each looking more unconscious or dead than the other!

And... a Real ‘Beautiful Mind’: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Mugging.

== Astronomical News ==

British scientists have produced a colossal picture of our Milky Way Galaxy that reveals the detail of a billion stars, BBC News reports. "When it was first produced, I played with it for hours; it's just stunning,"

The Pioneer Anomaly has been resolved, thanks in part to efforts of the Planetary Society to help a small team find, then translate, and finally analyze more than 30 years worth of data, recorded on archaic media.  Sorry, it wasn’t “strange physics.”  But some very good science sleuthing was required.

Astronomers are reporting the first "Earth-sized" planets orbiting within the habitable zones of their stars.  They report stellar parameters for late-K and M-type planet-candidate host stars announced by the Kepler Mission. Three of the planet-candidates are terrestrial sized with orbital semimajor axes that lie within the habitable zones of their host stars.  Note with this kind of star, there is the chance of getting tidal locked, with one face always toward the sun.

It's  difficult to knock a star out of the galaxy.  To give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it  involves tangling with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core. Astronomers have found 16 "hypervelocity" stars traveling fast enough to eventually escape galaxy's gravitational grasp. Now, Vanderbilt astronomers report in a recent issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hyper-velocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core.

Wind At Sea Is Strangely Van Goghish, says NASA. New instruments have taken a leap. One of the most beautiful and surprising things I have ever seen!  For the first time we can see how similar our atmosphere behaves to that of Jupiter.  Stunning, beautiful and thought-provoking!


Pop-Art? Artistic geological maps of solar system bodies.

==On the Technological Front==

One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

Touché proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but also recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body. Tap your arm or hand for gesture commands without a lens or electrodes, and so on.

== And some lighter stuff ==

See a hilarious xkcd about picking a college major:  Why 'Undecided' may be the best choice.

A lovely fantasy Voyager cartoon.

Another beautiful mash-up of classical music and space imagery.  Inspiring... and a bit cautionary....
Know that reader who loves to mix both romance and adventure with unusual personalities... and a little science? Have them give a look at the newest novel by Lou Aronica (author of BLUE) and Julian Iragorri:  Differential Equations. I see another book with that same title on my shelf, nearby (among my mathematics textbooks!).  Lou’s writing is much less dry... and there’s more romance!

And finally....  faux vintage travel posters for the solar system.

Space Resources: Re-igniting a can-do spirit of ambition

It appears that a small cabal of the Good Billionaires -- those who got rich through innovation and who feel loyal to the future -- are about to to fund a new effort worth some excitement and attention. It aims at transforming not just our Earth -- but the whole solar system. And, along the way, this endeavor may help bootstrap us back into our natural condition... a species, nation and civilization that believes (again) in can-do ambition.

Can that be achieved - while making us all rich - through asteroid mining? 

In its Tuesday announcement, Space exploration company Planetary Resources will claim a goal to "create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources.'... adding trillions of dollars to the global GDP."

Resources from space? It's not a wholly new concept.  Way back in the 1980s, in his prophetic book - Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets, my friend and colleague John S. Lewis explored in detail the range of minerals, volatiles and other useful materials to be found in all the different types of small bodies we know to be drifting about the solar system, from carbonaceous chondrites to stony or iron meteoroids, to dormant comets which (according to my doctoral thesis) may make up to a third of the asteroids we find out there.*

Back then, as a young fellow at the California Space Institute, I recall many long conversations with John and the few others working in the field, striving to come up with ways to get some movement in this area. Before it became clear that the Space Shuttle would suck up every gram of funding or attention.

 What makes this new effort unique is its high-profile support group. The venture is backed by Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film director James Cameron, and politician Ross Perot's son, among others.  Moreover, I am pleased to note that John Lewis is, indeed, one of the major advisors for this new company, along with his former students, noted planetary scientists Chris Lewicki and Tom Jones. 

The founders apparently did their homework. (A Cameron trademark.)  They apparently mean business.

== A Long and Hard Road ==

But what kind of business? Is such a grand project feasible? As I see it, there are a several distinct general problem domains.

1) Prioritizing asteroidal science.  Naturally, as an astronomer who specialized in small solar system bodies, I approve of this phase one. (My wife, Cheryl, also did her doctoral work in this area - we're neighbors in the solar system.) 

It also correlates well with President Obama's wise decision to abandon a fruitless return to the sterile Moon, in favor of studying objects that might make us all rich.

In fact, this seems an excellent time for private funding to make a big difference. New thresholds have been reached. The technologies needed for inexpensive asteroid rendezvous missions are coming to fruition rapidly, as we saw at the recent NASA NIAC meeting.  Some, in fact, are downright amazing, opening the potential for missions that cost mere tens of millions, rather than billions of dollars, confirming and characterizing these fascinating - and possibly lucrative - bodies.

2) Shepherding and changing the trajectories of small meteoroids and asteroids.  There are several techniques on the table.  Some of them surprisingly simple, using solar sails.  We might as well get started! And if these guys can give the technologies a boost, more power to them.

3) Legal, safety and environmental impact considerations. Is it even permissible to grab and "own" space resources? The pertinent treaties were left deliberately vague and it may be time to update them, so that investors in wealth-generating processes can be sure of decent return.

Of much more public concern - and sure to dominate the headlines - will be the image of deliberately moving asteroidal bodies toward the Earth. That's sure to prompt a lot of fretting and talk of lurid disaster scenarios. Oh, we'll start small and aim them toward the Moon or Lagrangian Points (e.g. L5), giving plenty of time to discuss issues of law and care in space. But these fellows need to come up with just the right tone of prudence, avoiding the kinds of lines spoken by Michael Crichton's science-hubris villains.  Like: "all contingencies are accounted for - there's no cause for concern!"

Worth pondering on the up-side: these same technologies might someday prove very useful, if we spot something dangerous, on a long-warning collision course toward Earth.  If done right, this is a potential world-saver, not world-killer.

4) Mining, disassembly, smelting and refining in space.  Here we're still in a very tentative, sketching phase. Most concepts involve using large mirrors to concentrate sunlight and process the raw materials. Or else solar energy to drive heat and electro-mechanical processes indirectly. If this can be done robotically and efficiently, all the way off in L1 or Lunar Orbit, then much smaller masses of refined substance could be transported down to GEO... where electrodynamic tugs might bring it to LEO... where cheap, asteroid-made braking shells would deliver the goods safely to collection points on Earth.

5)  Or, better yet, much of the iron and nickel and such could be used up there in orbit to make more cool things and reduce the burden of launching bulk material out of our planet's deep gravity well.  Certainly, storing the volatiles like water and carbon and nitrogen compounds in orbit-made tanks will be a major side-benefit, providing the materials needed most for both life support and rocket fuel. To derive those benefits would entail learning to do many other things in space. Larger habitats and radiation shielding. Possibly solar energy collectors of massive scale, beaming power 24/7 to Earth. Or grand vessels to explore the planets.

6) Economics. It's a lot more complicated than the first calculations might make you imagine. In Mining The Sky, John Lewis calculates that even just one asteroid a kilometer across - of a certain type - might (if smelted down) produce the world's entire steel production for 10 years!  

It gets better. Try the entire world's gold and silver production for 100 years!  That plus a thousand year's production of platinum-group elements.

The good news?  We would be unleashed to do a myriad things with cheap raw materials, while cutting way back on wasteful, inefficient and polluting processes to mine and process the stuff here on Earth.  Much less digging, grinding and greenhouse gas emissions. All that wealth, generated with solar mirrors melting rocks way out in space.  Talk about improving the balance of payments....

One reality check?  Downstream, after this ball gets fully rolling and initial R&D costs are paid off, you can expect the prices of gold and platinum to plummet.  That's a good thing, overall! We have much better uses for gold than leering gleefully over stupid coins and bars. Still, bear this in mind when you start rubbing your hands over how rich you'll get from asteroid mining.

You won't be rich enough to own the world.  Sorry.  Just very very very rich, from doing a whole heap-loads lot of good for us all.

7) Which brings us to the final positive outcome of all this. We'll all benefit.  But the top fellows who are taking the risks, who will reap a lot of the rewards, happen also to be the good billionaires. Archetypes of how capitalism ought to work.  Self-made moguls who got wealthy by helping engender new-better products and services, not by means that Adam Smith himself derided as parasitism.  These guys have proved, time and again, their loyalty to the positive-sum process that raises all boats.  This is the kind of endeavor that will keep them up there as role models, instead of the new feudalists.

It's certainly how I plan to get rich.  By delivering magnificent, daring products that help take us to the stars.

== NOTES ==

*  A little colorful aside:

In our 1984 novel Heart of the Comet (soon to be re-released) Gregory Benford and I portrayed a dramatized effort to harvest space resources, by sending a human crewed mission to Halley's Comet in 2065, intending to use the controlled evaporation of the comet's own material (an effect long-known) to divert it into orbit near the Earth.

A bit extravagant in its action-adventure aspects (though based on my doctoral work), the book still conveys the best science known about these mysterious and wonderful bodies, including the main process by which some of them evolve into dormant asteroids.

.

== And Now...Some Science Potpourri ==

Our Interstellar cousins?  Researchers have found two promising stars, called HIP 87382 and HIP 47399, that had the same metal content and were at the same evolutionary stage as the sun, with similar galactic radial velocities, suggesting that they just might have been formed in the same nursery cloud, over four billion years ago.  If so, the idea is that perhaps planets in that cloud cross-fed each other life (due to meteoroid impacts). Possible places to find cousins and compare genealogies in a Galactic 23&Me?  I'm a bit dubious. That is sixteen galactic rotations ago!  A lot of time for smearing.  Still... kind of a cool notion to mull over.

George Dvorsky writes - perhaps a bit too optimistically - about how the project to disassemble Mercury into a Dyson Shell of orbiting solar collectors might be do-able within the lifespan of some kid alive today.

Several start-ups are looking to develop internet services to the four billion people worldwide who have basic mobile phones but no access to the internet.  Example: Mobile-XL is far from being your typical mobile web browser. It is built to work entirely via SMS, the old-style message system. It works on old-style phones that have Java. The only cost is sending and receiving a text message, substantially cheaper than paying for data in most parts of the world. Another startup: with biNu, webpages can load much faster than on a smartphone, and use far less bandwidth. How? Simple, really. Most of the processing is not done on the phone, but in the cloud. "We virtualize the smartphone.”

A mushroom that can eat plastic! Even at the airless bottom of landfills! cool stuff.

The Nikon Small World competition offers startling, beautiful and fascinating glimpses of the sub-microscopic world.

Printable robots?  Or... robots making robots?  As in Stargate?

== And Finally... A Linguistic Anomaly ==

Pompous teacher: “In some languages, a double negative still means negative.  In a few tongues, two negatives in a row cancel and make a positive. But there is no known case in which a double positive makes a negative!”

Answers snide student: “Yeah, right.”